The present invention relates generally to field of system interface. More specifically, the present invention is directed to sending and receiving data to and from a system.
Embedded systems are growing more and more complex, requiring a range of external management applications such as SNMP, Command Line Interfaces, TNM, WBEM, etc. These applications have completely different interfaces, network protocols and purposes but must all interface to the low-level internals of the system.
In order for a system to perform successfully in a user environment, it is necessary that the user be able to configure the system to operate as desired, and to be able to observe the device for troubleshooting and monitoring purposes. Further, the system needs to be able to provide its configuration at any moment and needs to be able to be restored to captured configuration. The configuration may possibly be editted offline. This functionality is collectively known as xe2x80x9cmanagementxe2x80x9d.
Management may be effected through a variety of user interfaces. The most common is Command Line Interface (CLI), where configuration and display commands are entered in text mode and promptly executed. Another common interface is Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) where configuration and monitoring data is transmitted over the network.
A technology currently in development by Sun Microsystems and various partners is working towards a much broader and more abstract framework. JMX (Java Management Extensions) is a Java based model for implementing management services independent of a management protocol. Sun""s model is much broader in scope and is also incomplete; the specifications are in an early form of definition by the JMX community. JMX completely replaces the internal applications with their own framework.
It would be advantageous to have an interface definition that allows implementers of device drivers and low-level system services to provide configurable attributes and statistics to the higher-level system management applications without knowing anything about the system management applications.
In one embodiment, method for providing a generic interface is disclosed. Data available in a system is identified. Each data is categorized as a scalar data or a tabular data. The tabular data is associated with data from a table and the scalar data is not. Each data is further categorized as a parameter data or a statistic data. The statistic data is pulled from the system. The parameter data is either pulled from the system or pushed to the system. The data is grouped into groups based on logical relationships of data in the groups. A blank form is developed for each group of data. Each blank form has one or more fields defined to accommodate the data in the group. Using the blank form, the data is pushed to the system and pulled from the system.